Big Reader: Essays

By Susan Olding

A book about memory, loss, and a love of books from one of Canada's finest essayists

Ever since childhood, Susan Olding has been a big reader, never without a book on the go. Not surprising, then, that she turns to the library to read her own life. From the dissolution of her marriage to the forging of a tentative relationship with her new partner's daughter, from discovering Toronto as a young undergrad to, years later, watching her mother slowly go blind: through every experience, Olding crafts exquisite, searingly honest essays about what it means to be human, to be a woman--and to be a reader.

Big Reader is a brilliant, achingly beautiful collection about the slipperiness of memory and identity, the enduring legacy of loss, and the nuanced disappointments and joys of a reading life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781988298825

Susan Olding

Susan Olding is the author of Big Reader: Essays, and Pathologies: A Life in Essays, selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared widely in literary journals and magazines throughout Canada and the U.S. She lives in Victoria.

Book preview

Possibilities

Possible places to bring a book: your bed, under the blankets, with a flashlight. The bath. The back seat of the car, if you are brave, or foolish, or lucky enough never to get sick on the winding roads, or smart enough to open a window against the fumes of your parents’ cigarettes, smart enough to peel your eyes from the page every once in a while and watch the telephone poles flit past, flit past.

Try the fork of an apple tree in May, where you can prop your feet against the facing branch and suck the scent of blossoms from your lungs to the soles of your shoes. Behind the neighbour’s house the sun will sink, staining the sky the shade of pink at blossom’s core. Petals and page gleam white and whiter in the half-light.

The doctor’s office, the dentist’s, the lunch counter at the local delicatessen; the dock, the deck, the porch, the beach. The couch in the room where everybody else watches TV; sink unseen into its green cushions, leaf through a dozen chapters to the ripples of canned laughter.

The schoolroom, where you can slip your book inside the regulation reader; while your classmates sound out words like see Spot run, your tongue can try on catapult, and luminous, and ravishing, and riverine.

Tap the syllables against your teeth, roll them like a chocolate egg along the roof of your mouth; savour your guilty, solitary joy. Rain splatters the windowsills, radiators hiss and hum, the air reeks of mucilage and damp mittens, while forgotten, at the back of the room, you lose yourself in story and sound, where with your secret book within a book, you might be any she or he or they or we or I.

Image depicts irregular and random lines drawn on the page. Verso is written on the right side of the page.

In Anna Karenina Furs

SO COLD, IT HURT TO BREATHE. The squeak and crunch of snow beneath my boots, a flicker of lights from across the frozen lake. I walked quickly, swinging my arms, my whole frame vibrating, struck like a crystal goblet and still ringing. The cold, I told myself. It’s only the cold that makes me shiver.

It was mid-January, the night of my thirty-second birthday, and I was on my way to my legal ethics professor’s house for supper. My husband, also a student — I’ll call him Arthur — was out of town, visiting his family. He hadn’t seen them over the holiday, and I’d sent him off with my slightly grudging blessing. Later, I felt sorry for myself. I didn’t want to be alone. So, when my teacher, Mark — I called him that even then — stopped by to drop off some materials, I invited him for tea. We talked, and kept on talking, and eventually he suggested we continue the conversation over an evening meal.

Mark and his wife had separated a few years earlier, and she was living in their former home. He was renting a place from a colleague on sabbatical. The main rooms of the house were fronted with glass, and, as I approached it through the darkness, it glowed. From the street, I could see Mark setting the table. I didn’t find him handsome. Although he was tall and dark, he was thin and wore nerdy eyeglasses. But I liked the way he moved. There was something graceful in the way he held himself, something deft and alert in his attitude. I thought about my husband, who was also tall and thin, but who seemed so much heavier, somehow, with his big raw bones. All autumn and winter, he’d been sleeping ten hours a night or more, and still he was always tired.

Mark cooked salmon in stimpirata sauce with celery and capers. There was salad and a citrus tart. A crisp but oaky Chardonnay. Toward the end of the meal, his twelve-year-old daughter came home — he and his ex-wife were sharing custody — and told us about the movie she’d seen with her friends, her ringlets trembling as she laughed. Some wax from the candles dripped onto the cloth. I scraped it up and pressed it, warm, between two fingers. When I pulled them apart, the wax held the delicate imprint of their whorls.

I walked home through Breakwater Park under a bright moon, the snow glistening and my toes losing their feeling. I considered the evening. Nothing had happened. But in the night, I dreamed of him, and when I woke, I knew that everything had changed. Nonsense, I told myself. It’s not as if I’ve done anything. I don’t even intend to do anything. I’m not some Anna Karenina.

THE STORY IS FAMILIAR. Anna — the beautiful, lively wife of Alexei Karenin, a dry bureaucrat — falls in love with a dashing army officer named Vronsky, and the two begin an affair that becomes the talk of St. Petersburg. Anna’s husband reacts badly. In desperation, Anna and Vronsky run away, first to Europe, and then to the Russian countryside. There, Anna, barred from polite society and tormented by guilt, becomes increasingly jealous and paranoid, imagining that Vronsky no longer loves her. They quarrel, and, in drug-induced confusion and despair, Anna throws herself beneath the wheels of a train.

But the novel begins with Anna’s brother, the pathologically charming Stepan Oblonsky, and his long-suffering wife, Dolly. Throughout the novel, Oblonsky has several affairs. His behaviour wounds Dolly terribly, but she stays with him and continues to care for their children, finding small moments of joy in parenting. Meanwhile, no one thinks any the worse of her unfaithful husband. Unlike his sister — but like most other men of his time and class — Oblonsky does not pay a price.

I hated that double standard the first time I read the book. This was the seventies, during the height of second-wave feminism, and I was sixteen. The unfairness of Anna’s situation tore through me like a knife. Why should she suffer and die while her brother went on guzzling champagne? What kind of society could condone that?

The answer was obvious: a hypocritical one. And I knew all about hypocrisy. In high school, a person had to live and breathe it, along with the chalk dust — especially in my school, peopled as it was with fundamentalist Christians. A trio of them, earnest and judgemental and deliberately unworldly, sat across from me in English class. Two boys, and a girl, Armeda, the daughter of a minister. Pale and buxom, with downcast eyes, she wore low-cut peasant blouses and blushed at the resulting attention.

Naturally, the fundamentalists didn’t warm to Anna. They saw her as selfish and sinful, and said as much. It fell to me to defend her, and defend her I did, railing against her desiccated stick of a husband and the stupid social rules that constrained her choices. It made for lively debate; our teacher was pleased. And so, as the year went on, I continued to support the cause of emotional and sexual freedom. In the process, I became more and more excited by novels in general, and by this one in particular. I also came to identify with Leo Tolstoy’s heroine — though I was an unlikely Anna, lacking her grace, her charm, or her ability to fascinate men. But none of that bothered me. After all, I was young. I had plenty of time to grow into the role.

WE FIRST SEE ANNA on a train platform, through Vronsky’s eyes. Rich, beautiful, elegant: he notes these qualities dispassionately, as if ticking them off a list. But what strikes him most powerfully is her restrained animation, as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. By the time Anna throws an arm around her brother, in a movement that surprises Vronsky with its resoluteness and grace, he has fallen in love with her.

At age sixteen, so had I. How could anyone not love Anna, with her firm, light step, her warmth, her humour? She bewitches everyone from irritable old ladies, like Vronsky’s mother, to irrepressible children, like her nephew Grisha; she touches everyone she meets with joy. She even saves her brother and Dolly’s marriage.

What an irony, then, that she can’t save her own. Kitty Shcherbatsky, Anna’s protégé and rival for Vronsky’s love, recognizes the danger first. Watching Anna and Vronsky at a ball, she sees that they feel themselves alone in the midst of the crowd, sees how they mirror one another’s expressions, and knows her own fate is sealed. She will never marry Vronsky.

It isn’t until the next day that Anna can acknowledge her own change of heart. Feeling guilty for spoiling Kitty’s pleasure at the party, she leaves Moscow earlier than planned. On the train, she intends to read, but she’s agitated and unable to concentrate. With nerves as tight as winding strings, she doesn’t want to follow the reflections of other people’s lives.

She wants to live for herself — imagine the hubris of that. Anna is apparently struck by the same thought, because the minute she owns her desire, she’s overcome by shame. Yet when she thinks of Vronsky, some inner voice tells her, warm, very warm, hot! and, overtaken by joy, she’s forced to stifle a laugh. Minutes later, when she runs into Vronsky himself on the icy station platform, she knows without his saying so that he has followed her. Forget me, she tells him. But she cannot hide her delight.

I WAS TERRIFIED. There was no one nearby I could confide in. My friends were Arthur’s friends — and I certainly couldn’t tell Arthur. So, instead of talking, I wrote. In the margins of my notebooks. On loose scraps of paper. In a long computer document. In letters to a friend who lived in England. I didn’t know yet if Mark shared my feelings. I hoped he did and hoped he did not. Maybe nothing would happen; maybe it would all blow over and things could go on as before. But the dark closed in when I imagined that.

Sometimes, as I bent over my scribbler, tears would fall and smear the ink on the page. Arthur had never been able to stand seeing me unhappy or angry; if he caught me that way, he’d rush to my side, his face buckled in an uxorious frown. "What’s wrong, what’s wrong, ma chère?" he’d cry, in an unconscious echo of Karenin’s name for Anna. I shrugged him off. I’d never kept a secret from him before. But what could I possibly say? I told him I was working on my ethics assignment. My whole life had become an ethics assignment, and I was failing badly.

If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that Arthur and I were happily married. True, there were subjects we struggled to talk about. True, in the past, I’d been depressed, and lately he seemed depressed himself. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time he’d really relaxed and had fun. But domestic life was good for us. With little money and a lot of ingenuity, we’d fixed up our apartment. And even if, as one friend said, our kitchen walls were the colour of an old whore’s makeup, they still glowed in the candlelight. We talked about books and ideas, and we rarely fought; how could we fight when he hated conflict? Our friends thought of us as the perfect couple. Yet here I was, overcome by feelings for someone else that I couldn’t control and couldn’t explain.

Women tell me, ‘I was lonely, not connected,’ ‘I don’t feel close to my partner and I was taken for granted,’ a marriage therapist says in a WebMD article I discovered years later. These are the reasons women commonly give for their infidelity. Revenge for past wrongs and sexual boredom may also play a part. Yet, as a biological anthropologist explains in the same article, more than a third of unfaithful wives claim to have been happy or very happy in their marriages — at least until meeting their lovers. It’s only after she’s danced with Vronsky that Anna notices the ugliness of her husband’s ears, with their cartilages propping up the rim of his black felt hat; it was only after spending time with Mark that Arthur’s habit of quoting philosophers in the midst of our rare disagreements began to drive me crazy.

Women don’t leap easily into affairs. That is certainly true for Anna, who tries, briefly, to avoid Vronsky altogether, rather than give in to her desires. It was also true of me. The change in my feelings seemed to come in an instant, and took me completely by surprise, but, like Anna, I struggled to do what was expected of me instead of what I wanted. Like Anna, I lost that struggle.

WE DIDN’T HAVE SEX. Not while I was his student. Not while Arthur still lived with me in the same house. But we flirted. We carried on. And we became the subject of gossip every bit as wild as the gossip that follows Anna and Vronsky.

Once, we travelled to Toronto to see an art exhibition. Somehow, we persuaded ourselves that the trip would constitute research. We took the train and then walked to the gallery, where we ogled the sculptures by Lipchitz and Hepworth, and I got in trouble with security for venturing to touch them. I had to do something with my hands. On the ride home, our arms briefly met, and an electrical current made the fine hairs stand on end.

Spring came early that year and lasted an unusually long time. Bluebells and snowdrops gave way to daffodils and narcissus, and, when the narcissus faded, the lilac bloomed. Its fragrance filled me like never before. I am amazed at the clairvoyance of people in love, says Vronsky’s cousin, Princess Betsy. I was reminded of her observation whenever I’d go for a walk at the lakefront, lost in reverie, and then turn to see Mark coincidentally emerge from around a corner. Even the air felt alive. Time stops running when he’s near, I wrote. Everything is here. Everything is now. And now and now and now and now.

ANNA TELLS KARENIN in the springtime. Vronsky has fallen in a horse-racing accident, she has made a public scene, and she is pregnant with his child. The words come tumbling out. Likewise, I told Arthur in early April at a point of crisis. Our classes were about to end for the year. He had accepted a summer job in Toronto, and I planned to stay and work in Kingston. I couldn’t bear to part with so much dishonesty between us.

Of course, he already knew. He’d heard the rumours. He’d seen me talking with Mark in the university corridors and had noticed the brilliance of my smile. You haven’t smiled that way for years, he said, his own mouth a crumpled ruin.

We talked and wept and talked some more, more openly, more genuinely than we had talked in years, maybe more openly than ever. Our conversations filled me with fear and regret. He was a good man, a decent man, and he really wanted our marriage to work. Was it his fault that he couldn’t deal with sadness or anger in himself or in others? Was it his fault that this urge had overcome me? When I thought of losing Arthur, my stomach lurched and sank. But when I thought of losing Mark, the light disappeared. For the next few months, I was always falling through darkness.

AT SIXTEEN, I idealized the character of Anna every bit as much as a new lover idealizes her beloved. To me, she was a romantic heroine, ruined not by any flaw in her own character but rather by the rigid conventions of her day. After all, why is she punished? For living honestly — for refusing to cloak her true feelings. Vivid, passionate Anna does not want to pretend; she wants to live.

If Anna was a figure of romance to me, she was also a sort of proto-feminist — the kind of woman who, in my own day, could have lived with any man she wanted. She wouldn’t have been stuck with the vain and shallow Vronsky — or, even if she had chosen him, she could have left him when she realized her mistake. If she’d lived in 1970s Canada instead of 1870s Russia, she wouldn’t have had to invest her whole identity in the role of mistress; instead, she could have pursued a career of her own. Intelligent, decisive, charming, she could have succeeded in any number of professions. Or so my thinking went.

I was fully persuaded that Tolstoy saw things as I did. Why else would he make Anna so attractive, with her musical laugh, her beguiling ringlets, the warmth and animation that always suffuses her face? Why else would he show Vronsky attempting to comb over his bald spot? And why else would Karenin talk with such affected irony? Never mind his unfortunate ears or his wide feet; no woman could stay married to a man so incapable of forthright speech, much less a woman as earnest and ardent as Anna.

My fundamentalist classmates saw things differently. For them, Anna was a harlot. Vronsky was not only arrogant and selfish, but a pig. Karenin was a decent man, mistaken in some of his decisions, perhaps, but deserving of respect and honour. And the true hero of the story was Tolstoy’s stand-in, the landowner Levin, who, with his tendency to lecture others, his social awkwardness, his religiosity and his humourlessness, seemed to me remarkably like the Christians themselves. No wonder they took his part.

If Levin’s not the protagonist, why does the book end with him? my classmates demanded. Anna doesn’t even appear until Chapter XVIII, and she is dead for the whole last section of the novel. Why did Tolstoy kill her off if he approved of her?

"Then why it is called Anna Karenina?" I countered.

WHEN ANNA AND VRONSKY finally run away, Anna feels unpardonably happy for a time. The memory of her husband’s unhappiness does not poison her pleasure. On the one hand, this memory is too terrible to think of. On the other, it is also the cause of her own joy, so she can’t repent: The memory of the evil done to her husband called up in her a feeling akin to revulsion and similar to that experienced by a drowning man who has torn away another man clinging to him. That man drowned. Of course it was bad, but it was the only salvation, and it was better not to remember those dreadful details.

So I tried to ignore Arthur’s pain in the flush of my own first freedom. I dreamed I was standing on a ladder, working on a large painting. I painted a tree, which on its own grew branches and golden leaves. I painted mysterious sea creatures that took off in flight against the blue-grey sky. As I worked, it seemed to me that the piece lost its symmetry but gained significance, and I woke up smiling.

Walking through Breakwater Park from my place to Mark’s, in sandals now instead of boots, I felt the wind tickling my knees, the sun warming my face and ruffling my hair. Mark had a silliness that Arthur lacked. In the long evening light, we’d turn up the music and dance; we’d spin out puns and ridiculous pet names and then laugh so hard it hurt. We stuffed ourselves with strawberries and homemade gelato. We drank a lot of wine. And then, of course, there was the sex. If I thought of Arthur, I pushed the thought away. To flourish is to become dangerous, I wrote in my journal, quoting Robert Frost. And then I quoted Melville: The only real infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.

IN THE FEVERED EXCITEMENT of a new, illicit relationship, a woman rereads her marriage from a different perspective. Belatedly recognizing that Anna has closed her heart against him, Karenin tries to adopt the unfamiliar language of love. If he hadn’t heard there was such a thing as love, he would never have used the word, she thinks. He doesn’t even know what love is. Until this moment, though, she has not seemed to doubt his affection for her, and, outwardly, at least, they appear to be a devoted couple. Similarly, I parsed Arthur’s sentences, finding only evidence of our incompatibility, despite a history that included at least as much contentment as dissatisfaction.

When an adulterous woman rereads her marriage, she also rereads herself. Having prided herself on her virtue, Anna is shocked by her feelings for Vronsky, and no longer knows who she is. Am I myself, or someone else? she asks. A hundred years later, faced with the same unexpected emotions, I found myself struggling with the same unanswerable question.

I HADN’T CONSIDERED Anna Karenina for many years, but suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. Even its size and heft seemed to echo the mess I was in. And everywhere I went, I caught glimpses of Anna. On train platforms, of course, but also at the bank, at the grocery store, even in the mirror. It bothered me to think that my life had become a nineteenth-century melodrama. Wasn’t I supposed to be creating my own story? Wasn’t I supposed to be unique? Still, I couldn’t stop the comparisons. As the weeks went on, they only seemed more fitting.

The breakup of the Karenins’ marriage is as wrenching as the breakup of Baltic ice. Anna nearly dies in childbirth, Vronsky shoots himself, and Karenin alternates between rage and forgiveness. My own breakup led to similar heartache. Arthur, though he was in Toronto for the summer, didn’t intend to give me up, so he tried, with increasing desperation, to woo me back. We talked on the phone late at night; we visited one another. But these visits were painful, and, between our strained conversations, we stumbled around like air-raid survivors. In a photo